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The good news: F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, an exploration of the fallacies of socialism and the very real political hazards of bureaucratic, centralized planning, has been riding high on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. It even made it to No. 1 on the list, and is No. 6 as I write.

Pretty amazing for a reprint of a 66-year-old treatise on how economic controls foster tyranny.

Economist Hayek’s most accessible tome first hit it big in the 1940s, especially after Reader’s Digest excerpted it. The book resurges in popularity now thanks to something a bit different than a Digest excerpt. Glenn Beck featured it on his controversial talk show, praising it in glowing terms.

But there’s a deeper reason for its comeback, the reason Beck turned to in the first place: Its insights seem particularly relevant in an era of spastic expansion of government power.

That’s the bad news.

Gene Healey, at Cato Institute’s blog, suggests that “the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek’s book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government. . . . Things seem out of control.”

In spite of the American tendancy to try to personalize and asign the lead person all of the resposibility, both presidents have been presiding over a COngress run amok for the past several years. Neither president has done anything of note to try to change the rush for the abyss. Mr. Bush only didn’t actually egg tem on like Mr. Obama, but he DID rubberstamp everything they did. The lack of balance of power; the lack of competition fot resposibility every since the 17th ammendment took away the state’s representation, and the realtively easy times of the past decade have allowed a rabid minority to take over.

As Jefferson said, an educated populace is the best defense against tyranny. Let us hope that the awakening giant will once again triumph over the sneak attack, only without all of the loss of life inherent in the process.

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Thought of the Day

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Victor Frankenstein of Justine Moritz in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Ch. 8Read More »